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Who knew … until last year:
Three African-American women working — in obscurity — for NASA as
mathematicians played a vital role in the mission that sent astronaut John
Glenn into orbit around Earth and brought him back again, in 1962.
Publication of Margot
Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures and the subsequent release of
the acclaimed 2016 film brought the story of the important roles played
by Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson to light for the first time for many.
While their story may have been little known for decades, struggles
for opportunity and inclusion are familiar to many women and to members of under-represented minorities or other groups working to
make a career in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) field. Findings on gender equity from the latest SPIE Optics and Photonics Global Salary report
indicate that women in the field lag behind men in salary and in representation
in management and senior academic positions.
The cost…

More than 20 billion Internet of Things
(IoT) devices are expected to be deployed within the next few years; by 2025,
this number may reach as much as 1 trillion connected devices. Driven by growth
in cloud computing, mobile communications, networks of data-gathering actuators
and sensors, and artificial intelligence with machine learning, this trend will
change how we live our lives.
Already we live among connected devices
in our homes.

Increasingly, we will also wear them,
drive them, and monitor our health via the IoT. More businesses will build,
ship, and design products and manage inventory with connected devices. In our
cities, transportation, communications, and security infrastructure, and
services such as water distribution and energy management will employ IoT applications.
Farmers will find many uses, from insuring the health of livestock to
increasing crop productivity.
Several conferences scheduled for SPIE Defense + Commercial
Sensing 2018 (15 through 19 April in Orland…

Hyperspectral imaging, like many other of today's technologies, is moving into numerous commercial markets after developing and maturing in the defense sector. While still having a strong presence in defense applications, the technology is now used in chemical detection, food quality assurance and inspection, vegetation monitoring, and plant phenotyping, among others.
For more than 20 years, advances in spectral imaging have been on display at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing (DCS). The applications and capabilities of the technology have grown along with the conferences and exhibition at SPIE DCS.
The ability to see more than what is visible to the human eye has always been one of the goals of optical engineers. With hyperspectral imaging they have been able to achieve just that. By accessing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the sensors are able to image a specific wavelength range, or spectral band, and combine images of multiple bands into one 3D scene.
Through analysis,…

Unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) are testing the limits of people’s comfort with independent capabilities of technology — yet these technologies are also enabling more productive crops, faster and safer disaster relief, and other benefits across fields of healthcare, defense, transportation, agriculture, and security. While some among the nonscientific population
might still be making up their minds about self-driving cars and other
unmanned autonomous systems, industry, government, and academia are moving forward to
look for more ways to improve and even save lives. In the field
Among recent projects, Hands Free Hectare at Harper Adams University was developed to enable every part of the farming process to be done by robots, not humans: “Automated machines growing the first arable crop remotely, without operators in the driving seats or agronomists on the ground.” Simon Blackmore, professor and head of engineering at Harper Adams, described in an interview with SPIE during SPIE Def…

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a … CubeSat?
Small, boxy, cost-effective nanosatellites are helping to change the way we explore space. Not only are they making low Earth orbit (LEO) space exploration more accessible due to cheap production, but they can be used in both commercial and amateur projects, making applications versatile.
Originally, CubeSats were invented by researchers at California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University to “enable graduate students to design, build, test and operate limited capabilities of artificial satellites within the time and financial constraints of a graduate degree program,” Space Daily reported recently. This was accomplished by establishing a standard CubeSat dimension of 10x10x11 cubic units — small enough to speed up the process and ensure low costs.
(A search on CubeSats literature in the SPIE Digital Library provides insights into how the technology has developed.)

The future happens at
SPIE Optics + Photonics
What will the future look like? For technologists, policy makers, and venture
capitalists alike this is the million-dollar — really billion-dollar — question.
For scientists and engineers working on the technology that
will fuel this future, the question is more about where to secure funding,
where to publish, and where to present their research. SPIE’s Optics + Photonics symposium in San
Diego this August is the choice of many of these top researchers to present
their latest iterations on future-impacting technology.

The future of medicine
Technology will most certainly play a large role in the
future of healthcare, from innovative imaging techniques and personalized
medicine to further understanding of the brain and how it functions and
malfunctions. While not a major focus of
the symposium, many healthcare-enabling technologies will be presented.
A group of Italian researchers will be presenting their work
utilizing machine learning to a…

Wearable devices, materials, and even temporary tattoos are entering
healthcare and other markets, offering the potential for faster, more accurate,
and potentially life-saving treatment.
Tracking and measuring activity in the 11 major organ
systems in the human body systems is imperative for medical providers to
quickly and accurately diagnose and treat patients experience trauma or other
emergencies. But existing medical equipment may be uncomfortably bulky or take
valuable time to set up.
Skin-like devices and other technologies can provide
unobtrusive, comfortable, and precise alternatives for sensing what is
happening inside the body.
In one development, researchers at the University of Texas
at Austin are developing a skin-like temporary tattoo that takes measurements
of electrical signals from the heart, muscles, and brain (see a video presentation in the SPIE Digital Library and a report in IEEE Spectrum). Nanshu Lu and Deji Akinwande of the University of Texas at
Austin have …

Authored by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the Photonics for a Better World blog focuses on research news and the many ways technologies are applied to advance science and improve quality of life, and on the people who make that happen.